Does one celebrate their 50th birthday...or mourn it?
I guess I'd chosen the latter. What's to celebrate? I'm divorced...my ex-husband ran off with a girl half his age and has since burned through her AND married a third time...our kids have moved on and don't so much as call anymore, even for birthdays, and nobody so much as stepped up to throw me a party. So I checked into a suite at a new chic hotel downtown. Brought my favorite wine with me. Planned on having a nice dinner. But one drink after checking in and the realization of sitting alone in a restaurant "celebrating" my birthday was pathetic.
No one called.
No one cared.
Nothing.
I still pulled up Maps on my tablet and searched Restaurants in the area, thinking I could pick up something to go and bring it back. Lots of nice places. Nothing sounded good.
Poured a second glass of wine. Barely touched it. The room, actually a corner one-bedroom suite with a full kitchen nearly as big as my apartment (and far nicer), started feeling claustrophobic. I opened the drapes. The fourth floor view was beautiful. All those pretty specialty shops and restaurants just below. Maybe I should take a walk. Maybe I'll find something nice to buy myself.
I didn't even dress up. Black jeans, a black V-neck spandex short sleeve top (hey...I still had a skinny figure), and an unbuttoned white blouse. I stopped in a couple of clothing shops, but nothing struck my fancy. A jewelry store, but felt some weird dread that no one was buying ME something nice for my birthday. Thought about stopping at a nice looking restaurant with a bar I passed, but my self-esteem was getting worse as I went and didn't feel like getting hit on. In fact, the more I wandered, the angrier I was feeling inside.
Amidst the new architecture of the neighborhood were some old buildings and businesses that had spitefully stuck around through the city's modernization efforts. One of those was an adult book store the city just couldn't get rid of. BOOKS - VIDEOS - NOVELTIES - ARCADE, the sign read.
Novelties...vibrators?
"Go fuck yourself, Bev," I muttered to myself. And I went in. For the first time since I could remember, I was feeling a rush of excitement.
The place had a surprisingly small selection of videos. I guess the internet can be thanked for that. The novelties were clearly taking over. There were fetish outfits and costumes and sex toys that got so odd they probably required an instruction manual just to figure out what exactly they were for. The variety of dildos and vibrators was crazy. Plastic. Silicone. Hand-blown glass. (huh huh huh...blown.) Vibrators that connected to smart phone apps so people in distant places could control its pulses while it was inside you. Some of the prices were equally crazy, getting up over $100. I settled on a silicone candy red penis-shaped vibrator. It was vile, yet so pretty. And a more reasonable $30.
The cashier, a petite blonde girl who appeared to be barely old enough to shop here, asked if I found everything. I acknowledged and paid her.
"Let's check it to make sure it works," she said. "Do you need batteries?"
I sheepishly nodded.
She took it out of the package and put a new set of batteries in as I got my money. She turned it on and OH MY GOD IT WIGGLES.